I tried the new soft drinks from Trump’s son and granddaughter. Bad!

Sollos, a yerba mate ‘built around the Florida lifestyle’. Photograph: Sollos View image in fullscreen Sollos, a yerba mate ‘built around the Florida lifestyle’. Photograph: Sollos Analysis I tried the new soft drinks from Trump’s son and granddaughter. Bad! Adam Gabbatt Barron Trump has a new yerba mate and Kai Trump a ‘bold’ energy drink – would their offerings pass the taste test? Do you like sugary soft drinks? Do you like Donald Trump and his family? Do you want to support nepotism? If the answer is yes to all these questions, then have I got the products for you: a pineapple yerba mate co-founded by Trump’s son, and a syrupy, energy-drink-thing developed by his granddaughter. Both endeavors represent the first steps by First Boy Barron Trump and First Granddaughter Kai Trump into the world of business. But how will they fare? Have the pair inherited Donald Trump’s famed business nous, a special kind of shrewdness that saw the president file for corporate bankruptcy six times and oversee the failure of numerous business interests? Or could their investments actually be successful? I bought both drinks to find out. Barron Trump’s effort, Sollos, came first. Sold with the vaguely threatening slogan “It begins where it ends”, Sollos says it is a “brand built around the Florida lifestyle”. Which lifestyle? Retirement home? Monster truck? It doesn’t say. The drink’s “about” page does, however, claim that “SOLLOS is designed revolving around the cycle of the sun”, a phrase as grammatically incorrect as it is meaningless, while its creators – Trump, 20, is one of five co-founders, all of whom have spent some time in Florida – also say the drink “is built to move with your day”, a phrase I do not understand. “Most brands launch with four flavors hoping you’ll like one of them; we have been obsessing over one flavor until it was flawless,” the website claims. The flavor they went with is pineapple and coconut, and it retails at an eye-watering $39.99 for 12 cans. It arrived, to its credit, in very nice packaging. Excited, I opened a can of Sollos. It smelled like suncream mixed with pineapple juice. I took a sip. It tasted like suncream mixed with pineapple juice. I poured some out. It’s the color of a sort of posh apple juice, with the glass-staining sugariness to match. It’s not for me. But then, I am not the target audience: I am neither seeking a beverage that will, in Sollos’s words, “truly fit how people in Florida actually live”, nor I am necessarily looking for something which “all started in a cabana”. In fairness to Trump and his Sollos collaborators, their drink does feature some commendably natural-seeming ingredients, including organic raw honey and organic monk-fruit extract, neither of which I could taste. So, what about Blue Raz Slush, the drink by Kai Trump? It’s a collaboration with an existing drinks company called Accelerator, and is, according to Accelerator, “inspired by nostalgic blue raspberry slushies and summertime memories”